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Savannah family's history in photos tells stories of years past

Special to Savannah Morning News In this photograph from 1967, Martha McKinney poses on Easter in front of the Forsyth Park fountain with her step-daughter Charlotte Meador's family, including children Michael and Deborah and husband George.

Special to Savannah Morning News Mandi Meadors, who is now 26, on what the family calls Mandi's bench, where she has been photographed for all but two of the Easters in her life so far.

Special to Savannah Morning News George and Charlotte Meador on Easter 2004. This was George Meador's last Easter.

Special to Savannah Morning News The Meador family at the Forsyth Park fountain on Easter in the early 2000s. Adults, standing, are Charlotte Meador, holding granddaughter Madelleine Clark; Debbie Meador Olliff, Michael Meador, Lisa Meador and George Meador; Children in foreground are Kelsey Olliff, Matthew Ollif, Jayce Meador and Mandi Meador (kneeling).

Betty Darby/For the Savannah Morning News Charlotte Meador with some of the photos her family takes each Easter at the fountain in Forsyth Park.

Ah, the Easter photos. Practically every church-going American family with children has them. They show little girls in frilly dresses and little boys in matching dress shorts and bow ties, clutching Easter baskets and clearly poised to run off and get dirty. And in Savannah, along with the familiar elements of gathered relatives and spring flowers, the background in a lot of those photos is the same — the Forsyth Park fountain.

That ornate fountain has been a part of public life in Savannah since 1858, according to the history provided on the City of Savannah’s Park and Tree website. Like downtown Savannah itself, the fountain has had its ups and downs since then, and in the 1970s it suffered heavily from vandals and a rare ice storm. A major restoration was carried out in 1988.

If you are in the park on Easter Sundays, you may have noticed a quiet little tradition for some Savannah families. After church, they troop over to Forsyth Park and take family photos in their Easter finery in front of the ornate fountain. The Meador family of Savannah has been doing just that for some 40 years, and you’ll find them there again tomorrow.

It all started when George and Charlotte Meador were a young couple raising their three children in what was in the early 1970s a new Southside subdivision.

“My neighbor that still lives on the same street I do — we raised our children together — asked what I was doing after church on Easter. I told her we’d probably have a big dinner, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come to the big park downtown? That’s where we always go after church,’” recalled Charlotte, sitting at her dining room table sorting through stacks of family photos in search of the Easter ones.

A family tradition was born that year and continues. Some years, they’re all there — George and Charlotte with their two daughters and son, later shots in which each child contributed another generation. Other years the group is smaller, as teen grandchildren were away on school trips or other events. Some years a family member is absent in the photo because he or she was playing the photographer, and in others strangers stepped in to snap the shutter. Among the most poignant of the collection is the 2004 shot of just the Meadors alone in what proved to be George’s last Easter.

The photos are also a sort of running history of the fountain itself, which among other things, changed color over the years as very restoration projects came and went and maintenance waxed and waned.

“The most wonderful thing is when they replaced the pipes in the fountain and that was all dug up,” Charlotte said. “I have a picture of my daughter Lisa in her Easter dress climbing in the piles of dirt.”

The first shot of the Meadors in front of the fountain has nothing to do with Easter. George, fresh out of the Navy in the late 1960s, had taken a job at Candler Hospital, which was then downtown and near the south end of Forsyth Park. The family followed a little later, waiting for the oldest child to finish out kindergarten. Among the snapshot collection is one of the family on its first visit to Savannah, with the fountain in the background.

What started casually became a tradition.

“I have a picture of our first grandchild, Mandi, when she was four months old in the stroller in the park in front of the bench and every year at Easter except two, her picture has been made on Mandi’s bench, and she’s now 26,” Charlotte said.

Mandi will be married in a destination wedding in Mexico this May, but arrangements have already been made for her to put on that wedding dress a second time and join a photographer in Forsyth Park to be photographed on that bench.

While traditions remain, that doesn’t mean they don’t change with the times. The latest twist on the Meador tradition is an Easter picnic in the park.

“My daughter-in-law started that about three or four Easters ago and we all wound up at a picnic in the park,” Charlotte said. “We take pictures and sometimes they bring games and play badminton or invite strangers to play horseshoes.”